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Review: Spy thriller ‘All the Old Knives’ is complicated and with an OK twist

Thandiwe Newton and Chris Pine star in “All the Old Knives.”  (Stefania Rosini/Amazon Studios)
By Michael O’Sullivan Washington Post

Based purely on anecdotal evidence, the spy thriller “All the Old Knives” is going to be a talker. More specifically – if the three conversations I overheard on the way back to the subway from a recent screening are any indication – many of those conversations are going to begin with, “What the flip just happened?” That’s not necessarily because it’s confusing. But it is complicated.

Based on Olen Steinhauer’s 2015 novel, the film unspools mostly over the course of a long conversation in a pretty (and pretty empty) wine bar in Carmel-by-the-Sea with the sun setting gorgeously, from late afternoon to evening, over the Pacific in the background. In the foreground: CIA operative Henry Pelham (Chris Pine) and his former colleague – and former lover – Celia Harrison (Thandiwe Newton). So you know the scenery up close is easy on the eyes, too.

What they’re talking about is a bit more taxing on the brain. Eight years before the conversation in question, when Henry and Celia were both stationed in Vienna, a Turkish passenger plane was hijacked, with the bad guys – some combination of Chechens and Somalis – holding the passengers hostage in that city’s airport. Their demands: the release of prisoners from Germany.

Somehow, a Russian-speaking Chechen (Orli Shuka), now based in Tehran but once Henry’s contact in Moscow, is also involved. And I haven’t even gotten to the complicated part yet. For simplicity’s sake, let’s call all that, as they do in the flashback-laden film, Flight 127. Flight 127 didn’t end well; it has subsequently been revealed that there may have been a mole in the CIA’s Vienna station during the tense standoff.

The station chief, Vick Wallinger (Laurence Fishburne), has dispatched Henry to California wine country, where Celia is now married with two kids, to interrogate her as a suspect over rosé, free-range artisanal bacon and pumpkin puree. Depending on the outcome of this interview, an assassin is standing by to execute Celia – because, as Vick puts it, the agency can’t afford the bad publicity of a trial.

And if you believe that bosh, you’ll have no trouble accepting the hot sex scene between Henry and Celia, which takes place, also in flashback, smack dab in the middle of l’Affaire Flight 127. The sex isn’t entirely gratuitous, but it is essential for a particular plot twist – and there are more than one or two of them – to even make sense.

It’s a pretty good surprise, and I didn’t see it coming, even though I did catch some other MacGuffins floating around in the middle distance of this espionage stew. Call it the curse of the critic, whereby every secondary character and extra looks like a potential suspect. The film hops back and forth in time, between all the aforementioned cities and London, where Vick’s deputy (Jonathan Pryce) is also interrogated by Henry.

The framing device of the conversation between Henry and Celia, which includes a bit of flirtation, necessitates a certain ennui, though director Janus Metz (“Borg vs. McEnroe”) does his level best to open up the claustrophobic setting with frequent jaunts to other times and locales. Come to think of it, there’s an air of a tennis match to the proceedings of “All the Old Knives,” with its two protagonists playing a mental game of volley and return, as it were.

Who’s the winner and who’s the loser here? Or does that question not really matter? And is it ultimately worth the wait? The short answer to that last one is: probably so. The answer to the other questions is, as I already mentioned, a lot more complicated.